The present invention relates to a cognometer, and more particularly to a portable electronic cognometer including a memory monitor and a concentration monitor.
Repeated testing of memory and concentration is needed to identify declining cognitive function that may require medical evaluation for dementia, delirium, other medical or psychiatric illness, or the cognitive side-effects of medications. Repeated cognitive monitoring is not commonly carried out even in medical settings, let alone at home, due to lack of a device for automated, eaasily repeated testing.
Easily repeated testing also makes it possible to determine any individual's best (and worst) performance at baseline, so that the individual's memory and concentration in the future can be evaluated by comparison with his or her own previous performance, rather than only by reference to less sensitive general norms obtained from the performance of other more or less similar persons.
Automated testing should provide reliable, rapid, and automatic administration, scoring, and reporting, so that repeated testing can be carried out reliably in precisely the same way as frequently as desired, at home as well as in medical settings. This permits self-testing by the general public, and monitoring of patients with Alzheimer's disease or other cognitive impairment, at home as well as in medical offices, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, psychiatric facilities, or nursing homes.
Tests of memory and concentration should be designed to elicit maximum performance on rigorous but brief and easily repeated tests of sensitive, early, and prominent indicators of cognitive impairment. These tests will be regarded as ecologically valid and appropriate only if they check functions that everyone is expected to be able to perform in ordinary life; for example, everyone is expected to be able to remember a telephone number or copy a sequence of digits. The tests of memory and concentration must require only the simplest of responses, e.g., pressing numbered keys, so that appropriate responses can be obtained from all but the most severely impaired persons. Preferably these tests should be self-paced to compensate for the cognitive slowing often present in aged or cognitively impaired persons. To identify excessive slowing that may be an early indication of impaired cognitive processing, response speed may be measured and reported.
It is essential that such tests measure only the ability in question and not be affected by other considerations. For example, if a person has vision or reading problems which prevent him from seeing or understanding what he does see, his subsequent inability to reproduce a number displayed does not reflect on his memory. Similarly, if he has manual dexterity problems which interfere with his reproducing a displayed number on a keyboard, his failure to key in a number which he was supposed to memorize does not reflect on his memory. Thus it is critical that any cognitive test isolate the cognitive ability being tested and, even if it does not test that ability alone--for other factors always come into play--the test should at least evidence the other factors at play.
Accordingly, it is a object of the present invention to provide a reliable, rapid and automatic administration, scoring and reporting test for self-testing at home or elsewhere.
Another object is to provide such a device which provides for ecologically valid and appropriate testing.
A further object is to provide such a device which effectively isolates for testing the cognitive ability to be tested, even in aged or infirm users.